Visualizing Modern China: Image, History, and Memory, 1750–Present
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This highlights a second assumption: that the act of seeing is a simple phenomenon and that all people in all times and places have used their eyes to see in basically the same way. Certainly, seeing is in part a natural process involving the anatomy of the eyes and the physics of light. But it is also a mental and cultural process and, as such, it varies greatly over time and space, societies and cultures. To return to our example, in order to interpret that same beer TV ad, future historians would have to understand how we watch TV. At the very least, they would need to understand that the image was an advertisement, that such ads were broadcast most frequently during certain kinds of programs (like sporting events) and that they were targeted at specific audience demographics. It would also be helpful if they understood habits of TV viewing, for example that ads were frequently ignored by viewers—hence their simplistic, vivid, and often repetitive nature. (Without such knowledge those future historians might conclude that twenty-first-century humans were dolts.) In other words, we have developed specific habits of seeing in relation to TV and, even more specifically, in relation to TV ads (channel-surf, space out, mute button, etc.), and we would not want to confuse this sort of seeing with the type done by, say, a visitor to an art museum, a luggage inspector at an X-ray machine, or a religious worshipper viewing a statue in a temple. Changing technologies and changing contexts have radically changed how we experience seeing and how we process and interpret visual information.
Visual culture is also deeply related to social identity. How others perceive us and how we perceive ourselves is often based upon the image we present, the clothes we wear, the way we decorate our homes, or the photographs we post of ourselves on Facebook. Beer advertisers use images of scantily clothed women as eye-candy to sell their product because their target demographic finds such women appealing and flattering to their self-image. Such commercials reinforce expectations not only about ideal women, but also about the ideal men who cavort with them. The men and women who view such commercials may be profoundly influenced by such messages; alternatively, of course, they may resist them and strive to assert other identities and present themselves in another light. But in either case, visual images and media are important shapers and markers of who we are, and this phenomenon may be as true of other cultures as it is of our own.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, images both mask and are suffused with power. When we accept images at face value we often miss the ways in which they work to support or challenge existing power relationships. For example, some would argue that using images of women in bikinis to sell beer increases the likelihood that men will see women as sexual objects available to satisfy their desires; or, further, that linking sex with alcohol in this way might increase the probability of sexual violence against women. According to this interpretation, such images support and reflect the existing power structure in which men dominate and abuse women. At the same time, the fact that the people in the commercial (and all beer commercials) are merely holding their beers and not actually drinking them represents a victory (however small) for people concerned about the dangers of alcohol against the powerful alcohol companies, which would prefer to portray people consuming their products and not merely holding them. Clearly the power dynamics that shape an image can be complex, and how we interpret them can vary according to the perspective we bring to bear.
In sum, the meanings within images are contingent on the processes by which, and contexts in which, they are produced and consumed. Images are always embedded within (and often play a crucial role in shaping) social, cultural, economic, and political relationships. Thus, to understand images, we must first understand the multifaceted history of their production and consumption in cultural and political context. With this in mind, the remainder of this introduction will use examples from the chapters that follow to offer an overview of the transformation of visual culture in modern Chinese history.
Projecting Visual Power: State-Society Relations from Empire to Nation
As was true of earlier Chinese imperial dynasties, the last great dynasty to rule China (and to dramatically expand the realm that we call China today), the Manchu-ruled Qing dynasty (1644–1911) was profoundly shaped by images of authority projected outward by the emperor, the imperial bureaucracy, and the court. Michael Chang’s chapter examines one of the most famous imperial spectacles, a series of six “southern tours” undertaken by the Qianlong emperor, during which the Manchu ruler, accompanied by an enormous retinue, toured throughout the Jiangnan region—the center of elite Chinese culture where the alien Manchu conquest had met with fierce resistance only a century before. Chang begins his chapter with a simple question: “What did an imperial southern tour actually look like?” It would seem that history has provided a simple answer as well, for the court commissioned the painter Xu Yang to document the tours. But visual records, just as much as written ones, can disguise as much as they illuminate, so Chang checks Xu’s paintings against available documents as well as court paintings of other imperial events. What Chang finds in Xu’s renderings are vivid depictions of the emperor’s majestic and orchestrated movement across the landscapes of south China (Figure 1.2). But perhaps even more interesting is what Chang finds is missing from Xu’s paintings, a glaring absence that cuts to the heart of the Qing dynasty’s ethnic politics: There are no yurts! An enormous imperial compound with hundreds of tents and Mongolian-style yurts was a central feature of the southern tours, yet these encampments are completely missing from Xu’s depictions. Why? Chang surmises that Xu’s selective representations are reflective of Qing ethnic politics and the different audiences that viewed these different presentations. The southern tours themselves were a huge, complex, and highly orchestrated series of events choreographed for literati elites and common villagers alike. With their military-style encampments and thousands-strong Mongol and Manchu horsemen in military attire, the tours were intended, in part, to impress upon the general public the martial authority of this non-Chinese dynastic ruler. But the court paintings—produced by an elite Chinese artist, in a style epitomizing Chinese court culture, for the eyes of only top officials—served the very different purpose of providing an esthetic rendering of the tours’ majesty and grandeur for elite consumption. In this context a focused rendering of yurts and military camps would have seemed esthetically jarring, alien, and even somewhat barbaric to Chinese eyes. Thus, as Chang notes, “The irony and the lesson is that when we think about the visual impact of the southern tours, we actually cannot simply rely upon visual sources, such as court paintings,” because the images owe their appearance to a careful process of esthetic and political editing.
Figure 1.2 The Qianlong Emperor’s Entry into Suzhou in 1751, featuring the emperor on horseback surrounded by his most loyal and stalwart Manchu and Mongolian troops. From: Xu Yang, Qianlong nanxun tu juan [Illustrated Scrolls of the Qianlong Emperor’s Southern Tour]. c. 1770. Scroll six detail. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Used with permission.
The example of Qianlong’s southern tours demonstrates how careful historians must be in analyzing visual evidence. For Cecily McCaffrey, however, the obstacles may be even greater. She is trying to write history from “below,” from a perspective that is almost completely absent from the archive—the perspective of peasant rebels. Peasant rebellions plagued the Qing government throughout the 1800s. The largest involved up to a dozen provinces, left millions dead in their wake, and are considered among the most important events of that century. Yet the search for the rebels’ perspective in the archival record rarely meets with success. First of all, visual materials depicting rebellions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are few and far between. Moreover, just as history is written by the victor, it is often illustrated by the victor as well, so what images do exist mainly depict rebels as the state saw or wished to depict them through its biased lens. Despite these constraints, McCaffrey asks us to imagine what a rebellion might have looked like to those who actually partici
pated in it. Sifting through archival sources for visual descriptions when elites or government officials actually confronted rebel armies, McCaffrey reads these texts against the grain, finding clues of organized behavior and potent religious and visual symbolism amid the chaos of battle. As her chapter reminds us, much is left out of the historical record if one focuses solely on evidence gleaned from official records. In analyzing evidence, historians must therefore pay attention not only to what is there, but also to what is absent. The state’s failure to attend to certain subjects does not mean they were unimportant, but it speaks volumes to the ways in which the state structured its understanding of these subjects.
As we move into the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, however, we find Chinese political leaders attempting to expand their reach to the “masses” by reading and shaping public perceptions, as shown in Charles Musgrove’s chapter on the late 1920s construction of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum (Figure 1.3). The mausoleum’s architect created a space where 50,000 people could observe rituals honoring Sun, transforming traditional funerary rites into visual ceremonies aimed at displaying citizens’ loyalty to the memory of the “Father of the Nation” and, by extension, the Guomindang (Nationalist Party) state. This aim stood in marked contrast to imperial-era tomb building, which was conducted in semi-secrecy on sites forbidden to commoners. In the transition from Qing empire to Chinese republic, politics had changed, and the visual imagery of politics had changed along with it. While both political forms—empire and nation-state—gave rise to elaborate, elite-sponsored public displays of authority, republican monumentalism invited the public itself to take part in state ceremonies as citizens and to gaze upon the symbols of political ritual and power in ways that commoners living under the Qing would have found incomprehensible.
Disseminating Images: Urbanization, Identity, Nationalism
The public participation in state image-making Musgrove describes depended to no small extent upon emerging technologies of mass image production and the design of explicitly public spaces for mass gatherings, modern phenomena that were overwhelmingly urban centered. Cities were becoming the places where images were produced for dissemination to the rest of the country, and where people get their images often in turn shapes their identity. Think, for instance, of the distinctive roles played by cities like Paris, New York, and Tokyo in creating fashion icons, or Hollywood, Hong Kong, and Bombay in creating movie stars: those cities have had disproportionate influence in defining what the ideal “man,” “woman,” “American,” “Chinese,” “Indian,” “Japanese,” etc. is supposed to look like. In China, Shanghai (“the Paris of the East”) led the way in producing a plethora of new and exciting visual images, coming for many to represent the epitome of modern cosmopolitan culture.
Figure 1.3 This full-page photo of the ceremonial internment of Sun Yat-sen’s at his memorial outside Nanjing graced page one of the China’s most cosmopolitan pictorial magazine, the Young Companion in June 1929. The towering grandeur of the monument is highlighted both by the perspective of the photograph and by the caption “Under blue skies and brilliant sunshine the Chinese Republic sorrowfully and reverently placed its creator at rest in the magnificent mausoleum at Purple Mountain at noon on June 1.” From: Liangyou Huabao, June 1929.
Figure 1.4 Painted wood block of Zhong Kui (auspicious demon slayer) in the form of a door god, produced in Yangliuqing area, Kangxi era. In addition to New Years pictures, Yangliuqing’s artisan produced images of household deities such as door and kitchen gods that were also customarily hung during New Year celebrations. This rendering demonstrates the refined style for which Yangliuqing was so renowned. Artist anonymous. From: Pan Yuanshi and Wang Lixia, Yangliuqing ban hua [Yangliuqing Prints]. Taipei: Xiongshi tushu gufen youliang gongsi, 1975.
This process did not happen overnight. Rural areas continued to produce nationally significant visual culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Madeleine Yue Dong’s chapter reminds us. The Qing dynasty’s promotion of an agricultural and handicraft economy had resulted in the flow of cultural production from villages into the cities. One example of such a rural-to-urban cultural current was the woodblock printmaking industry centering on the town of Yangliuqing, not far from the city of Tianjin. Here the production of nianhua, or New Year’s Paintings (Figure 1.4)—hand-colored woodblock prints for ritual and celebratory display—was a thriving industry, generating thousands of original illustration designs and tens of millions of prints annually. Dong argues that the industry’s success was inextricably tied to its location on the northern end of the Grand Canal, the central artery for shipping in the Ming and Qing dynasties. This location meant that print shops not only had easy access to paper and pigments shipped from the south, but also were proximate to the major urban centers of Beijing and Tianjin, large and elite markets for their artworks. Yet, by the 1930s the printing industry in Yangliuqing had shriveled: print shops closed, thousands lost their jobs, and the few remaining prints produced in the area were of inferior quality and sold poorly. What caused this thriving visual cultural industry to vanish? Dong shows that the radical reorganization of transportation and economic infrastructure—including the demise of the Grand Canal, the rise of railroads and ocean shipping, and an economic reorientation toward urban-centered modernization—combined with the rise of new urban-based printing technologies of lithography, essentially reversed the economic and cultural flows that made Yangliuqing New Year’s Paintings possible. In sum, Yangliuqing’s folk visual culture was distinctive of a Qing cultural economy produced in and flowing out of the countryside into market towns and cities; but twentieth-century processes of modernization and urbanization reversed this flow of visual cultural production, and Yangliuqing simply could not compete economically.
Coastal cities and urban mass production soon gained supremacy within China’s cultural economy, a theme picked up in Andrew Morris’s chapter. In the 1920s and 1930s, photography, popular magazines, and mass sporting spectacles emerged as important shapers of visual culture and identity. For example, during their heyday in the Republican era, Shanghai periodicals transformed women’s physical culture and expectations about the socially and culturally prescribed roles that men and women were supposed to follow. The Republican era brought expanded opportunities for Chinese women, including a potentially liberating public mobility that would have been unthinkable only a decade earlier, while the concerns and desires of urban women in particular commanded increasing attention from a burgeoning media market of photo-laden magazines and journals. But this new public role and visibility came along with considerable objectification and commodification by a media enchanted with female images. While girls and women were exercising new freedoms as athletes, newspapers and magazines coopted their images and marketed them to the male public (Figure 1.5). Morris shows that new visual media were important mechanisms for shaping not only how the public perceived sportswomen, but also how Republican-era women experienced their own identities—their physical and psychological selves.
Figure 1.5 Three female champion swimmers, the He sisters, pose here for the camera. From: Qingdao shi Tiyu xiejinhui, Liang zhounian gongzuo zongbaogao [Two Year Anniversary Official Work Report]. Qingdao: Qingdao Tiyu xiejinhui chuban weiyuanhui, 1935, n.p.
Of course the impact of visual culture on identity formation in the Republican era was not confined to the realm of gender; nationality and ethnicity were also crucial. James Cook explores the strong connections among place, national identity, and image in China’s large overseas Chinese communities. Sometimes feelings of national identity emerge most strongly when people are physically remote from their place of origin, especially if they face discrimination in their new communities. Numbering more than ten million by 1920, overseas Chinese in places ranging from the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina to England and the United States often found themselves living in very hostile, anti-Chinese climates. Here, everyday images and symbols embedded in
architecture, newspapers, and ceremonies at local temples and voluntary associations were powerful connecting points that linked Chinese people living abroad with their homeland. For example, the architectural design of many overseas residences, the standard two-story shophouse or qilou, visually blended overseas Chinese economic life with references to traditional village life back in China (Figure 1.6). The image of China, embodied in construction, helped overseas Chinese to define themselves as “Chinese.”
Figure 1.6 A shophouse in Xiamen. From: Hong Puren, Xiamen jiu jing [Old Photographs of Xiamen]. Beijing: Renmin meishu chuban she, 1999. Used with permission.
The Power and Limits of the State’s Gaze: Envisioning China
But the forging of national identity is not only propelled through voluntary acts of community expression; more “top-down” acts of state promotion and intervention may have greater influence, and nation-states all work in various ways to shape identities via visual and mass media. As Zhiwei Xiao demonstrates in his analysis of 1930s cinema and censorship practices, the Guomindang government routinely intervened in film production at the studio level. Consistent with the New Life Movement, Guomindang censors focused on moral and behavioral issues. In regulating citizen behavior they sought to forge a Chinese identity that embraced modern notions of hygiene along with supposedly “Chinese” values regarding sexual propriety and adherence to social hierarchies. While it is easy to scoff at Guomindang efforts to politicize such things as politeness and grooming, Xiao’s chapter reminds us that urban cinematic culture could actually be quite ribald and diverse, prior to the arrival of party-state censors. Censorship aimed at creating a cohesive national “body” that drew its strength from the physical and moral purity of each citizen.